Mika Melvas
For Mika Melvas, type design was a hobby long before it became the primary way he made his living. He began his career as an art director and graphic designer in advertising agencies and experimented with type on the side. Following his passion, Mika worked hard to guide his career towards becoming a full-time type designer and lettering artist. “I worked on my calligraphy and lettering a lot,” he said in his Creative Characters interview, “ and practiced vectorizing them. After a long period of hard training I was able to resign from my art director’s post and start my own foundry. I think it’s good to have knowledge and experience of graphic design — it has worked for me at least. It means that you have an understanding how your clients would use your fonts and what kind of expectations they have.”
Get to know more about the man behind the typefaces in this week’s edition of #fontface featuring one of our favorite designers from Finland, @melvastype.
Here is an example how my process of designing a script font or a lettering project goes. My process varies and evolves all the time but this is one way I do stuff. 1. Brush pen scribble 2. Refined letterforms with pencil 3. More refined version with marker. 4. Perfected vector version. Every stage has several versions and whole process takes a bunch of paper sheets.
I like to have a lot of different pens and I like to always test a new ones too. So I have them quite a lot. All my pencil cases was getting too small so I went to hardware store and bought a tool box to store them. That actually works quite well. Then I decorated it by painting some text on it. It is Finnish and means “Penbox, Pens, markers, nips and inks” I used my Paintlay typeface as base because it has this sign painted look.
These are some of my brush pen calligraphy exercises. I try to practice calligraphy regularly with brush pens and broad nib pens. Though it tends to go a bit periodically. Sometimes I have days I practice a lot and then weeks that I don’t even touch any pen. It depends also in what stage I am in type design process. At early stages I use more pen and paper.
We have two dogs and one had puppies earlier this year. Here is one of the puppies checking the spacing of my Sivellin typeface. Like I said in my Creative Characters interview, outdoor exercises with dogs is an important and good way to recharge batteries for me. Also it is a great fun to play with them. They are quite funny.
I have a proper office space but I usually work just with my laptop and I can do work where ever I have that with me. This image is from a summer cottage where we sometimes spend time. It is good to enjoy the sun and do some type design simultaneously.
There is something about old books: the smell, notes on margins etc. It is nice that the books have some history and story behind them. Especially I like old lettering and type design books. I prefer those over new ones but of course if some great books is released I consider those too.
I’ve made quite a lot custom typefaces for companies lately. This is one of my favorite ones. It’s based on old hand painted tram signage. It included some research of the methods how painters did paint those letters. And then designing the typeface with some subtle modernization but preserving all those distinctive details and characteristics. These kind of type design projects gives great variation to the basic type design work.
It is nice to see your lettering and typefaces on objects you can hold in your hand or wear on you. These are some t-shirts I have designed for myself and clients. I’ve made also some lettering works on glasses and tumblers.
I also like to do custom type logos for companies. Type design gives a good base to designing these individual logos that meets the clients needs. Sometimes clients like the logos to resemble some of my fonts but with some added personality. Like that Freshpaint logo. It is based on my Sanelma typeface but I’ve customized it quite a lot.
This is the biggest thing at our life at the moment; We are having a baby on February. We are so happy and excited about this and can’t wait to have this little one among us. I couldn’t take picture of the baby so I made this lettering with brush pen, pencil and marker;)
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